


push my voice to hear it stall

by waveridden



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, Hades Tigers (Blaseball Team), Other, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:13:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29304798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waveridden/pseuds/waveridden
Summary: “Tyreek,” Landry says quietly. “I’m afraid you’re not really here, old friend.”“Who’s to say what’s really anywhere?” Tyreek says. It would be philosophical if it weren’t for the dry, teasing edge to it. “We’re not really anywhere. We’re standing in a dream."
Relationships: Paula Turnip & Landry Violence, Tyreek Olive/Landry Violence
Comments: 10
Kudos: 19





	push my voice to hear it stall

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you have half an idea and then you just have to triple down on it and make it a reality. Title is from [Still Out There Running,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOyu-LMseJw) by Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats.
> 
> CW's for Inception-typical unreality, nonpermanent death, and mentioned violence (it's really not graphic at all).

Silence has never been Landry’s forte, but he waits in evenhanded silence anyways. He’s not going to give Jessica the satisfaction of cracking first. Oh, she’s a great friend, good to spend time around, one of the most talented safecrackers he’s ever met, but she’s also smug. And melodramatic, when she wants to be.

So he waits, and everyone else in the room waits with him. It’s a makeshift conference room — which is to say, it’s a couple card tables pushed together in the warehouse that they all call their office — but Jessica’s grinning like she owns the place, even though she’s only run a couple jobs with them before.

It takes a minute or two of silence, but finally, she cocks her head. “You’re not gonna ask?”

“You said you had a job,” Landry says. “I’m not gonna play twenty questions with you, Jess. Tell me what the big deal is.”

“I have a tip.” She leans forward. “About the New York crew.”

“What about them?”

“They’re going after MacMillan.”

The shock in the room is instantaneous. Landry keeps his face impassive, but it’s an effort. “Why’d you come here?”

Jess doesn’t dignify that with a response. “I can bankroll,” she says, and this time not even Landry can stop himself from lifting his eyebrows. “It’s MacMillan. We all have a bone to pick.”

“Pricey bone.”

“And worth the cost.”

“What are they trying to get?” asks Hiroto. Finally, Landry thinks, someone else asking a real question.

Jess shrugs. “Beats me. He runs all the dreamshare technology. Maybe they want to run it instead. Maybe they just want to give him nightmares. I figured you guys should get the chance to give them to him first.”

A couple of people cast nervous looks at Landry. He ignores them. “There are two parts to this,” he says slowly, gears already turning. “We need to find MacMillan, and we need to find out what New York wants from him so we can get it first.”

“Is that a yes?” Jessica says. Some of the smugness is gone now, sloughing off as she straightens up. Jess is sharp, underneath everything; they wouldn’t work with her if she weren’t. He doesn’t know or care what her grudge is against MacMillan. All he knows is that she’s going to work hard for whatever this is. She believes in it.

Landry looks at Moody, sitting silently at the closest thing they have to a head of the conference table. Landry might negotiate, Landry might even run the dreamshare missions, but the final say for things like this always goes to Moody.

After a moment, they nod.

Jess grins, and for a second Landry swears that her teeth are sharp. “I’m glad you agree.”

  
  


#

  
  


Moody plans the assignments themself, as always, although Hiroto helps this time. They’ve been training her lately. Landry doesn’t think she realizes it, or if she does, maybe she doesn’t know what exactly it means, that she’s been chosen as their successor.

The team ends up split into thirds. Moody takes point on surveilling MacMillan, and Harrell takes point on the New York group. That puts Landry in charge of dream logistics, coordinating everyone. He’s used to it at this point. It’s all the usual suspects.

Except:

“I can’t be your architect,” Hiroto says apologetically. “I would, any other time, but Moody has me with them watching MacMillan.”

“Are you sure you can’t—”

“Moody said,” she repeats, and Landry just nods. “Could Ren do it?”

“Maybe,” Landry says, because it’s kinder than saying no. Ren’s not a great architect; neither is Landry, for that matter, and he doesn’t trust Jess to do this carefully. And putting aside Yaz, who’s going to be their chemist, that’s their entire team. “I’ll figure it out.”

“I don’t like that answer,” Hiroto says mildly, “but it’s your problem, not mine. Good luck.”

“Leaving already?”

“Moody wants us to get the jump on MacMillan, faster than New York does.”

“Good luck,” Landry says. “Be careful.”

She smiles. He decides not to comment on how wan it looks.

  
  


#

  
  


Landry met Paula Turnip by sheer coincidence. He was doing a pickup for Yazmin to repair something, and he’d taken the PASIV on the bus with him.

The woman next to him had tapped him on the shoulder when he was halfway home. “Excuse me,” she’d said, polite as anything, “but you should really disguise that better. Someone might want to steal it.”

“That a threat?” Landry said, and she just smiled. “Should I worry about you?”

“Oh, always,” she replied. “I’d love a PASIV. haven’t used one in a couple years, but they’re not as common as they used to be.”

“And what exactly did you use them for?”

“Making dreams when I was bored,” she said breezily, as though the PASIV weren’t a top secret piece of military equipment, as though it were possible for a random civilian to know anything about it. “But I was a pretty good architect. Could I borrow it sometime?”

Landry snorted. “Yeah, nice try.”

Once he got back to Yaz, she told him that some essential piece of it was missing, and instead there was just a business card. And Landry was so impressed that he called her, and that was how he properly met Paula.

It turned out that her mother had dirty money of some kind — not that Landry was going to judge being involved in crime, all things considered — and that was how she knew about the PASIV. But more than that, it turned out she actually was a damn good architect. A little rough around the edges, but that was a side effect of inexperience. She funded more than one Hades op in exchange for a chance to practice with the PASIV, which Landry always supervised.

The first thing Landry says when Paula picks up the phone is, “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”

Paula laughs. “Of course, what do you take me for?”

“How do you feel about doing a job with us?”

“Like, helping out with setup? I didn’t need a gun last time I did that.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Landry says, which stuns her quiet. “How do you feel about doing a real job with us?”

“Landry,” Paula breathes, “I thought you’d never ask.”

So they have an architect, inexperienced but determined. They have Landry, who’s one of the best forgers in the business. They have Yaz, the second-greatest chemist that Landry has ever met. They have Ren, who’s big, tough, good in a pinch, and generally likes being in dreams. And they have Jessica, who’s a thief, and a good enough liar that she could sell oceanfront property in Arizona.

Zion gets back to them with a deadline, the day New York is going after Parker. Moody gives them an earlier date. Just like that, the plan’s in motion.

  
  


#

  
  


Landry’s trying to teach Paula detail manipulation, little things like rotating chairs and changing furniture. They’re in his head because she needs to get used to manipulating things outside her own mind, sitting on one side of the street as she redecorates all the storefronts, one by one.

“I still think this is pointless,” Paula says, as a little Colombian restaurant turns bright yellow. The projections are starting to give them suspicious looks, but Landry figures they have a little while longer before it gets dangerous. “Where are we, anyways?”

Landry looks around. He hadn’t bothered to look too closely, hadn’t thought there was much of a point to figuring it out beyond being in a city. But he recognizes this street corner.

“Chicago,” he says, and he realizes what’s about to happen just before the hand lands on his shoulder. “Damn it.”

“Landry?” Paula says sharply, but he holds up a hand. Instead she stares, her project forgotten, behind him. “Who is—”

“Hello, Landry,” Tyreek says quietly. Even though it’s not real, and Landry knows it’s not real, the sound of his voice still makes some secret tension inside him uncoil. An unlocked door that he once thought was a wall.

“Tyreek,” Landry says quietly. “I’m afraid you’re not really here, old friend.” That’s not enough to stop him from lifting a hand to tangle his fingers with theirs, just briefly. He doesn’t turn around. Seeing them is the hardest part.

“Who’s to say what’s really anywhere?” Tyreek says. It would be philosophical if it weren’t for the dry, teasing edge to it. “We’re not really anywhere, the three of us. We’re standing in a dream. I don’t think we’ve met, by the way.”

“No,” Paula says. She shoots Landry a look, but he leans back and closes his eyes. If this is going to happen, he’s not going to sit through a glare while it does. “I’m Paula.”

“Paula,” they repeat. “Take care of him, won’t you?”

Landry has to bite his tongue so he doesn’t do something stupid, like try to argue with a projection of his own memory. “Don’t listen to them.”

“And why shouldn’t she?”

Landry doesn’t dignify that with an answer. Instead he forces himself to lower his hand from Tyreek’s, and the feeling of their fingers disappears from his shoulder. “Redecorating,” he says to Paula, and she sighs, but she goes back to her task.

He doesn’t listen to the sound of Tyreek walking away. He doesn’t listen, because there is no sound. It’s a metaphor, or an allegory, or some kind of bullshit about how Tyreek disappeared one day, and Landry still doesn’t know why, nearly two years later. So he doesn’t listen, and he doesn’t look back.

  
  


#

  
  


Paula asks everyone else about Tyreek before she asks Landry. He can tell because Yazmin and Ren start giving him strange, uncomfortably sympathetic looks for no clear reason. Jess, on the other hand, seems to be in even better spirits than ever. Landry wonders if he shouldn’t be offended by that.

It takes a week before Paula finally breaks and says, “I’m sorry about Tyreek.”

Landry’s in the middle of sorting through a fax, because Alyssa Harrell likes to _fax_ her intel for some reason. This means he has an excuse not to look up. “You don’t know what happened to Tyreek.”

“That’s not true.”

“I don’t know what actually happened to Tyreek,” Landry says, as calmly as he can. “I just know they’re gone.”

“You don’t need to know what happened to miss them,” Paula mutters. “Yazmin said you were close.”

Close feels like a woefully inadequate word for what Tyreek and Landry were. Landry had been dreamsharing off and on for a handful of years when he met Tyreek, a sheer coincidence of someone trying to assemble a team for a bigger dream project. They had a Chicago accent, and big eyes, and when they smiled it felt like a secret they were sharing with him, and Landry thinks part of his soul is lost to him forever, that it’s buried wherever Tyreek’s is.

And yet he doesn’t know that he’d call them close. Closeness implies space between them, the ability for something to separate them. Closeness does not explain that Tyreek was the first person who saw Landry’s attempts at architecture, and it does not explain the phantom pains that he experiences now that they’re gone.

“I have never met somebody like Tyreek Olive,” Landry says at last. “And I will never be lucky enough to meet someone like them again. Is that all?”

“You can tell me about them,” Paula says.

That, at last, is enough to get Landry to look at her. “Why?”

She shrugs. “That’s how you keep people alive,” she says, as though it’s that simple. “By remembering them. If you ever want to, you can tell me.”

“You’ve already seen them.”

“That’s not the same as knowing them.”

“Not today,” Landry says. What they mean is not ever. Paula doesn’t question this.

  
  


#

  
  


The New York group doesn’t have a goal, it turns out. They just want to prove that they can touch Parker MacMillan, the untouchable.

This doesn’t stop Moody. It certainly doesn’t stop Jess. And so Landry doesn’t stop either. He doesn’t let himself stop to think, not even on the day he gets on an airplane with his team and with MacMillan. He doesn’t let himself stop as Yazmin plugs the PASIV in.

“Break a leg,” she tells him. He smiles at her as he goes under.

The dream is too complicated. Landry knows from the moment he steps inside. Moody’s been working directly with Paula to build the late stages, and Landry hasn’t been allowed to see it in person — something about redundancy or deniability or one of those things that Moody is always on about. Something that means he knows his role, but not the setting.

Landry’s here as a forger. He’s supposed to keep MacMillan busy while Jess tries to safecrack inside his head, digging up some secret or another. He’s been briefed on the plan, but not the setting.

It turns out that the setting is three dreams, stacked together in layers, going ever deeper into MacMillan's mind. Landry's not surprised that MacMillan’s subconscious is militarized, all the projections populating his mind turning against them all at once. Ren sends them into the next layer of the dream anyways.

“Landry,” Jessica says, in the second level. “I don’t think this is going to end well.”

He’s busy scanning the room around them, trying to find MacMillan in the crowd. He sees Tyreek looking at him sadly; he ignores them. “This was never going to end well.”

“Do you think it’s worth it?”

Landry doesn’t know a lot about Parker MacMillan. He made PASIVs and then made them dangerous. He has a lot of security. He’s supposed to be some kind of saint in the dreamshare world, some kind of legend. But a lot of people have disappeared after meeting with him. Tyreek is one of them.

Landry’s not stupid. He knows that’s why Jessica came to this team — came to _him._ It worked. He’s beginning to think it shouldn’t have.

“It’s worth it if he doesn’t feel safe anymore,” Landry says after a moment. “I’ll man the PASIV on this level, you take Paula and MacMillan to the next.”

It takes them time to coax MacMillan into following them towards the PASIV, but Landry hooks everyone up just fine, does not think about Yazmin or Tyreek doing the same thing. He sends them a layer deeper into the dream.

He’s preoccupied keeping watch over them, which means he doesn’t see it coming when one of the projections smashes something into his head. He doesn’t feel anything at all.

  
  


#

  
  


This is the knife’s edge that Tyreek and Landry lived on:

Tyreek was the greatest chemist alive. The PASIV was a violin and they could play symphonies with it. They would experiment, coming up with new formulas and ideas, and Landry would let them experiment on him, the only person in the world he’d trust to do that. They were careful with him. Not many people were careful with Landry.

They met out of necessity, hired for the same thing. At first they liked each other because they worked together; then they worked together because they liked each other. It was mostly small-time corporate, local to Chicago or Hades or anywhere within driving distance. It was boring. It kept both of them safe.

They came to disagree, eventually, on the PASIV. Tyreek thought it could be used for justice and righting wrongs, a cleansing fire. Landry had always preferred scorched earth. Tyreek saw injustice and advocated for resources, for recovery. Landry had always advocated for revenge.

There is only so long that that difference is reconcilable.

  
  


#

  
  


Landry is in Chicago.

Or perhaps it’s not Chicago. It’s a city, and it is infinite. It reminds him of Tyreek, and so it’s Chicago, except for the places that are New York and Hades and airplane aisles.

It’s also empty, although that changes as he walks through it. He starts on one end, or in the center, or the edge or the nucleus or a crossroads. He moves through and buildings shrink and flatten, turn to houses and swimming pools and hallways. Landry walks through each and every one of them.

There are projections, some days. He never looks at them. Never look back. Never look to see them leave. He doesn’t listen to them, either, no matter what they say.

  
  


#

  
  


It is, by his count, a couple of centuries before he decides that Tyreek wouldn’t want him here.

He knows it’s limbo. Obviously it’s limbo. No manmade dream has ever felt responsive like this, putty in his hands, sensitive to the merest flicker of a thought in his hindbrain. He’s not completely sure how he got here, or how he’ll get out. But he knows he wants to get out.

He sits down in a building, one of few that he left untouched. The interior looks like an airplane. This means something, although he’s not sure what, or why. He sits down and reclines in his seat. There’s the briefest touch of a hand on his shoulder, just a moment. He breathes deep.

There is a list that he repeats to himself as the buildings crumble around him. He sits with his eyes closed so he doesn’t know what to expect, or when to expect it, and he repeats it like a mantra. He has to know the truth about Tyreek. He has to tell Jessica he forgives her. He has to keep Paula safe. He has to say goodbye to the team.

Tyreek, Jess, Paula, everyone. Truth, forgiveness, safety, farewell. Tyreek, forgiveness, Paula, everyone, truth, forgiveness, safety, farewell, Tyreek Jessica Paula everyone Tyreek—

  
  


#

  
  


The thing he remembers first is violence. The thing he remembers second is Tyreek. Landry himself is third. He’s comfortable with that.

When he opens his eyes he’s on an airplane. He has to fight back the urge to groan out loud. Clearly the dream had more layers than he remembered.

“Landry,” a voice says, high and terrified. It’s Yazmin, but that can’t be right. He doesn’t remember her being in the dream. “Landry, what’s wrong?”

He shakes his head. “I just need to wake up,” he says absently. “It’ll be fine. Do you have something I could borrow for that?”

When he opens his eyes, she’s sitting in front of him, something that the projections rarely if ever dare to do. “Landry,” she says, “you’re awake.”

“No, I know, I’m awake in the dream. But Yaz, I need to get back to the real world.”

“This is already—”

“Landry,” says another voice, much steadier. It’s Paula, in the seat behind him, leaning over his shoulder. He doesn’t look at her. “We can work on waking you up later. How about you get some rest? I bet you’re tired.”

Landry is tired. He’s more tired than he thought he’d be in limbo.

“Okay,” he says, and closes his eyes.

  
  


#

  
  


Landry doesn’t have natural dreams. It’s one of many, many things the PASIV has taken from him, like the desire to stay awake past eleven o’clock at night, like the acuteness of his sense of smell. He does not dream easily, if at all.

So when he opens his eyes to find himself in a hospital bed with Tyreek leaning over him, he knows with certainty that he’s still in limbo, or perhaps in somebody else’s dream now. They look different than he remembers, wearing clothes he doesn’t recognize, hair a little too long. But it’s them, all the way down to the slope of their shoulders, the way they exhale slightly when they see his eyes open.

"Good morning," they say softly. It's strangely crisp, for a projection. More clearly enunciated than Landry was expecting.

“Tell it to me straight,” he murmurs. “How bad is it?”

Tyreek smiles, although it’s terribly strained. “That depends on how this conversation goes.”

“Why’s that?”

“What are you planning on doing once I leave?”

“I need to wake up,” Landry says. “So I’ll do something about that.”

Tyreek exhales. “The last thing I want to do right now is put you into a dream, but it seems I might need to.”

“You can’t go under in limbo.”

Tyreek reaches towards his shoulder, but Landry adjusts away. Their hand hovers in the space between them before falling gently to the mattress. “Do you remember the argument we got in?”

“Which one?” Landry murmurs, although it’s a pointless question. Tyreek is asking about The Argument, the reason that they were with different crews. The reason that Landry wasn’t there when Tyreek went missing, although he will never tell them that he has that thought.

“You said to me that sometimes violence had to be the answer.” Tyreek’s fingers curl; if they moved their hand just slightly, it would be against his cheek. “That sometimes the morally right thing to do is fight.”

“You said that sometimes it’s the selfish thing,” Landry answers. “You’re right.”

“Maybe I’m feeling selfish,” Tyreek says. “Or violent. About whatever brought you here.”

“And what is that?”

“I haven’t gotten the full story yet.” Tyreek’s eyes move across the room. Landry turns to see Paula, fast asleep in a folding chair in a position that makes his back sympathy-ache. “She hasn’t said her name, just that Moody sent her.”

Landry frowns. “You know her name.”

“I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. I know her name, which means you do.”

“I’m not a projection,” Tyreek says, voice even. “We’ll work on it. Do you still have the knife?”

Landry’s totem, for years, was a Swiss army knife. It was broken in a specific way, a way that he knew well. The gears didn’t turn correctly so it was impossible to separate just one tool out. He can still see in his mind’s eye the way that the tools splayed out, rusty and squeaky, the same angle every time. He had to stop using it because Hiroto saw it at some point, and that means it's not a good totem anymore.

Paula’s wearing his jacket. That means Paula has his totem.

“Later,” he says. “I’ll check later.”

  
  


#

  
  


She gives him the jacket as soon as he wakes up, and looks away when he asks her to. There, in the lining of one of the pockets, is clumsy, awkward embroidery: Tyreek’s signature, or at least a poor mimic of it. Landry put it there when he was drunk and maudlin, a matter of days after he got the news about Tyreek. He hasn’t told anyone.

“What are you looking for?” Paula says.

“Nothing,” Landry says, and hands the jacket back to her. He’s needed new totems before. He can find another.

  
  


#

  
  


Tyreek Olive is dead, according to nearly everyone. Emphasis on nearly.

Paula tells him, now, that Jessica found some kind of dirt on MacMillan, that Moody has it, that she’s in the wind now. She’s bitter when she says it, to the point that Landry is surprised. He wonders if she expected Jessica to stay. That’s not what Jessica Telephone does.

The plane had landed and Yazmin had panicked, because Landry was still talking about waking up even though he was awake. She had called Moody, and Moody had said that one of them, only one, needed to take Landry to an address, a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

Paula had volunteered without hesitation. Something about how if it was a trap, it would be best for her to fall in it. She was new. The team could function without her. She had recognized Tyreek, naturally, from their constant presence in Landry’s subconscious. She had trusted them, because she knew Landry trusted them.

(She stutters here, in the retelling, over the word _trusted;_ Landry is thankful that she doesn’t say something like love, because if Tyreek is hearing that word from anyone, it’d best be from Landry.)

Tyreek, it turns out, is not dead, and although they are something approaching missing. They’d gotten too close to something or another that MacMillan didn’t want them to know, and so they were kidnapped away from their team, dragged into limbo. They forced their way out, somehow, but they stay to the sidelines. They still experiment with somnacin, but they don’t test it on anyone.

Only a handful of people know that Tyreek Olive is alive. Landry tries to be honored that he is one of them, instead of angry with Moody for keeping it a secret.

  
  


#

  
  


“How long are you staying?” Tyreek asks, around the fifth day of Landry’s convalescence.

Landry can tell, most of the time, that he is awake, dwelling in reality. Paula left on the third day and took his jacket with her. She swore to keep Tyreek’s secret, and Landry believes her. In the meantime he’s been making a new totem, and that helps. And Tyreek is here, longer-haired and somehow harsher around the edges than Landry remembers. That helps, too.

“I’m not sure,” Landry admits. They’re sitting in the farmhouse kitchen, sunlight streaming in. When Paula was here the three of them sat in a triangle at the round table. Now that it’s just them, they’re sitting close enough to touch, close enough that Landry can feel their body heat. “I could use a break.”

Tyreek smiles. “A break for Landry Violence? Unthinkable.”

“Everyone needs time off sometimes.”

“And where are you planning on staying during this break?”

Landry cuts a look at them; they’re smiling, warm, indulgent, carefree. It makes Landry think of Chicago. It makes Landry think of something better. “Here, I was hoping.”

Tyreek’s eyes crinkle for a moment, looking pleased, but it fades quickly. “I have nightmares,” they say. “Bad ones.”

Landry tilts his head. “Is that supposed to dissuade me?”

“It’s supposed to inform you. I can’t sleep when it’s cold.”

“I’ve been told I run hot.”

“I’m still involved, every now and again, with the violent things.”

“I know how to handle the violent things.”

“I want Parker MacMillan gone,” Tyreek says, which is the first thing they’ve said that surprises Landry. It must show, because they smile grimly. “He hurt me. And he hurt you. I’m surprised you don’t want revenge.”

Landry shrugs. “I do,” he says, and it’s the truth. But so is this: “It’s just that an old friend told me that sometimes recovery needs to come first.”

“They sound smart,” Tyreek says, poker-faced.

“Smart, if a little self-important,” Landry murmurs, and Tyreek laughs, so warm and close that Landry could nearly swallow it with his own mouth, drink it down like honey. “Tyreek Olive.”

They smile. “Landry Violence,” they say. “Stay with me?”

They are not safe here, not forever. There will be nightmares and vengeance and unwilling dreams to face. But they are together here.

“I will,” Landry says, and he knows that this is real, because the warmth of Tyreek’s mouth on his own is nothing like he has ever imagined. It’s better.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @waveridden on Tumblr, Twitter, and (occasionally) in the maincord, feel free to say hello!


End file.
